What is the most common way to start with mobile app development? Research → Design → Development → Testing → Deployment → Maintenance/ Upgrading This is standard practice when it comes to developing applications. However, over time, businesses have changed their ways of building applications. One of these changed ways is creating a Minimum Viable Product. There are more than six billion mobile devices in the world which are estimated to increase by 2026. This is a huge number when we think about the number of mobile users and the number of applications. The mobile apps market is also extremely competitive, and if you are thinking of developing an application, you need to have a USP which helps you stand out. Over the years, users' needs have changed immensely, and to keep up with these changing needs, businesses need to define the new model. Hence, MVP came into play. This app development model helps startups and middle and large scale companies develop applications with purpose. What is the Minimum Viable Product? Minimum Viable Product acronym as MVP is a basic launchable product that can work for early adopters. It is a basic app with needed features that define its value proposition. The major aim of building MVP products is to attract early adopters, understand the market, and make an application that fulfills user needs. Once you launch the MVP product, the next step is to take user feedback and re-iterate the app by fixing bugs and adding new features. Going further, let’s see the benefits of MVP products: Benefits of MVP Products: Focus on the Main Objective: Here, the main focus is to define the core objective of the application. You just need to focus on one idea and solve it. The purpose of the MVP model is to build the right product with a minimum budget. Having a high priority but minimum features can reduce the cost of the products. Early Testing Opportunities: When you develop an MVP product, one of the major benefits is that you can test it with the users. It helps you know whether the application fulfills the needs, is it helping users, are features working perfectly, and more. Early testing helps you to make the application better with each iteration. Gathering Feedback: When you provide the application to early testers, you get their feedback which helps you to make the application better. Each feedback will help you to make the application better by adding needed features and removing unwanted ones. Understanding the Market: When you research the market and develop an application according to its needs, you know the market better and are able to solve real-world problems. When you launch the MVP product and invite early testers, you realize what the people think of your product and ways you can make it better. Less Development Time: MVP products take less time to develop an application which means less development cost. This helps businesses to develop applications faster and save money. Budget Friendly: MVP apps are budget-friendly as it does not take much investment to develop basic app features. When you start with mobile app development, starting with MVP will help you know the market and users. Next up, let’s discuss the MVP development process: MVP Development Process: Start with Market Research: The first step you need to do is to carry out market research. Understand the market and your users’ needs. When you do market research, you understand the recent market trends, things your customers need, know your competitors, and understand how they are solving the problems. These things will help you to define the needs of the market. The first step is to conduct various surveys to know the market’s problems or the current need of the market. This will help you to solve real-world problems. One of the major reasons why startups fail is the lack of research. So, make sure to invest more time in research to understand the market and users better. Setting up User Persona: Understanding and defining your users’ persona is important. It will help you understand the product from the users’ perspective and provide them with a better experience with your app’s first iteration. Building a user persona starts from the first step: users opening the application to the last step, i.e., purchasing the products. Define the user’s flow and address the actions users need to take to meet the end goal. Following are the things you need to consider when creating a user persona:
Once you know the users’ activities and study them, you will know how to make the application better and make users interact with the application to make a purchase.
Selecting Technologies: The next step is to select the technologies you use. There are plenty of options available when you want to develop an application. But, the first thing you need to have is clarity that you are going to develop: an MVP or a fully functional application. If you are going with the former one, i.e., MVP product, choose the flexible and scalable technology. MVP apps will constantly be changing, and it will be easy for your developers to make relevant changes. You should always choose the technology your team is comfortable with. You need to know the type of architecture you will use. Here is the brief about two types of architecture:
Developing Features: Choosing features is crucial; you need to carry out market research and know your users’ necessary features. Here, you will need to verify your concept before moving to product development. When developing any application following are the typical steps:
One of the best examples of this is the app named “Burbn.” It was a location-based iPhone-only app that allows users to check-in, earn points to hang out with their friends, and share their pictures. Unfortunately, after the initial release, the application was not working correctly, and users were just sharing pictures. So the team decided to remove all the unnecessary features and keep the photo-sharing option. And this application today is “Instagram.” We all know the success of Instagram, and the number of users it has, the number of images, Reels, and Stories shared every day, and the amount of data generated every second. The key takeaway here is to know your users, understand their needs, and re-iterate accordingly. Testing: In this phase, you will need to do user testing and usability testing. The testing phase helps you know whether your app will be used and how users can use your application. These two things will give you more clarity on your application. Generally, before releasing any application, it is expected that it is complete. But that’s not the case with MVP products; the initial release is incomplete; it is expected to at least work flawlessly on any device. So, in MVP products, your aim while testing should be to make it flawless. Collecting Data: The main aim of MVP products is to collect user feedback, analyze them, and take necessary actions in the subsequent iterations. Once your application is stable, your next step is to set up the necessary tools to collect users’ feedback. Different measures you need to take to understand your users better, like demographic and behavioral data. Note: Data collection must be done with users’ consent. There are three ways you can collect the data from the users:
Note: Due to EU laws, you won’t use these tools to their full potential in European Union.
Launch: This is the last step. Here your MVP product is ready to launch, and users can use it. Remember, this is just the first step. You need to iterate the entire development process depending on the feedback you receive from your users. Going further, let’s discuss the cost of developing MVP products: Cost of Developing MVP Products: There are three ways you can develop your MVP products, let’s discuss them in brief: In house Development: When planning to start with in-house development, you need to consider plenty of things. First, you need to identify people with unique and different skill sets who can handle pressure and develop applications. There are pros and cons of in-house development as well. You will be responsible for everything from picking the team, assigning tasks, ensuring they are done perfectly, timely deliveries, etc. Here, the development cost is higher as you will need to invest a lot in hiring people, building the infrastructure, setting up servers, marketing, and plenty of other things. Outsourced Development: You can outsource your development to other IT companies like us to help you develop an MVP product from scratch. Established IT companies have a dedicated team of developers, researchers, designers, marketers, testers, system administrators, and sales who can help you with the entire development process. The major benefits of hiring IT companies are timely deliveries and industry-level work. You don’t need to worry about any technicalities as the companies will help you with everything. They will also help you with deployment and further updates and maintenance of the applications. Freelance Development: Many freelance developers can help you with developing an application. But, there are some loopholes here as freelance developers lack experience and will not provide you the complete infrastructure. You will have to deploy the MVP product, get feedback from users, understand them, and reach out to them to make the changes. This entire process includes many back and forth, and there are chances of miscommunication, resulting in the delay of release and making the process complex. Considering all the factors and depending on your requirements, you can decide where and how you want to develop an application. In my opinion, the best solution is to hire an IT company that can help you with app development and provide the needed infrastructure and resources. If you are looking for an IT company that can help you with ecommerce mobile app development, you can reach out to us. CTA: Get in Touch with Us Originally BlogPost Source: Here
0 Comments
Since the boom of the internet, there has been plenty of revolution, and we have come a long way from supercomputers to personal computers to mobile phones and smartwatches. With every passing day, new things are coming into the tech world. Over decades we have seen an increase in the usage of mobile phones and applications. Every week billions of users come online for the first time with mobile phones. According to Statista, there will be an increase of 4.3 billion new users by 2023. The mobile phones and app market has vast potential in the coming years as well. The increase in the number of users of mobile phones increases the number of applications as well. There have been plenty of applications in the Android and iOS market which are just going to increase over the coming years. There is also a huge market for developing applications, whether it is free or paid. If you plan to start with free ecommerce mobile app development and wonder how to monetize the app, you are at the right place. Herein, we are going to see different ways to monetize your free application. Ways to Monetize Applications: Freemium Model The Freemium model is a well-known way to monetize your free apps. Many leading applications like Clash of Clans, Spotify, MX Player follow this model for their applications. In this, users get access to the application’s basic features, and you can use advertisements to monetize. Further, if users need to access some premium features and don’t want ads, they can opt for a premium version of the application. Example: Talking about Spotify, it allows users to have access to the basic functionalities like creating playlists, listening to music, following their favorite artists, and more. Once they purchase the premium version, they get further access to other features of the application. Freemium models have three categories:
When starting with ecommerce mobile app development, advertisements are the most common way to monetize your application. There are different ways to display the ads in the application, depending on your business model. Following are different ways you can display your ads:
For example, Emirates Airlines used this ad type to promote their new New York-Dubai destinations by showcasing their full-screen ads to travelers in New York airport once they connect to the Wi-Fi.
Referral: Another name for referral marketing is Affiliate Marketing. This model connects with the previous model of an in-app advertisement to monetize your application. Necessary information about the other brands already exists in the application using affiliate links, and based on click and app installs, you receive a certain commission. The basis of these rewards is on the cost-per-action model or revenue sharing. There are three ways you can use the referral marketing model:
The subscription model sets up the revenue stream from the weekly, monthly, or annual fees for special services provided by the free app. This model is useful in cloud services audio and video streaming apps. Consumers receive access to the content according to their subscription plan. Some examples are Netflix, e-publications like Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc. Sponsorship: The sponsorship model is the most profitable way to make money from free apps. This model is for the developed apps that already have regular users. You can gain the major benefit of applications with a specific market niche. You can contact sponsors in the same industry to match their brands with ads, information in the app or adapt the app design with the brand. Two ways to run sponsorship deals:
This is a new way to monetize an application for free. Customers can use the following platforms to raise funds for app development and marketing: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, CrowdFunder, and AppsFunder. Email Marketing: Email marketing is a profitable method to gain users. Here, businesses can get the users’ information by making them sign up for newsletters. Businesses can increase their subscribers for the products and services. You can send emails about new products, discounts, new features, and services. These things will help you to increase traffic towards your website and increase sales. Pro-tip: Don’t annoy your customers by sending them emails too frequently. Keep the frequency of emails less, making customers open the emails and interact with them. Make sure to abide by the data laws of different countries while you are gathering your users’ email id and using them for your business. App Merchandise: Ecommerce industry is booming, and customers are shopping online from the safety of their homes. Amazon offers the opportunity to earn a profit from the app with the help of a merch tool, a program allowing app owners to create and sell their branded items. All the logistics are managed by Amazon, i.e., production, selling, payment, and delivery, while you also get your profit share. Conclusion: The app market is highly competitive and already has plenty of applications. You need to define different ways to monetize your application and make it available to people. If you are thinking of starting with ecommerce mobile app development, you can reach out to us. We will help you develop an application as well as help you define a monetization model. CTA: Get in Touch with Us Today one of the largest and the most used platforms for cross-platform app development is Flutter. Google’s constant efforts to make the Flutter framework better is making it more useful. Every few months, Flutter is launching new things to make their ecosystem stronger and easier to use for developers. This has made it a go-to solution for developers to develop cross-platform applications using a single-codebase. Today, it is the second most used framework globally and has one of the largest communities of developers. Its open-source nature, ease to learn and use makes it everyone's favorite. After a break of a year, Google came back this year with Google I/O, its much-awaited annual developer conference. This year it took some of the significant leaps in the various sectors like AI, ML, Quantum Computing, Material Design, Flutter, and plenty of others. Each of its products has some significant new features, which hopefully make the future of technology brighter. Herein, I will throw some light on Flutter and its major updates, which make the Flutter ecosystem stronger and provide a better developing experience. Flutter’s major aim is to provide ambient computing, which helps developers to develop interactive, intuitive, and feature-rich applications easily. This year their main aim was to make the ecosystem more robust and more secure than before. The flutter team is very active and constantly works on the feature requirements from its developer circle. Listening to developers’ requests, in Flutter 2.2, the team has made major changes that help developers. New Updates in Flutter 2.2: Flutter and Material YOU: The Flutter team works closely with the Material design team to bring more versatility to the framework in terms of design. The new design named Material YOU supports Flutter which means, developers can develop their applications using Material YOU which provides users more personalization. In simple terms, Flutter developers can get access to the new and old but tweaked widgets for Material YOU. Once the new design language releases its beta version, it will be available to use in your Flutter applications. Developers starting out with Flutter App Development can easily develop using Material Design and provide better experience to the user. The open-source nature of both platforms makes it easy to develop an application. Integrating Payments: For years, developers were asking the Flutter team for payment options, and finally, it is here. Flutter now supports integration with multiple payment modules like Google Pay, Apple Pay, and In-App Purchases. Instead of following multiple steps to integrate payment modules, developers can use a single-codebase to develop and integrate it. Now, developers can also provide in-app purchases to their customers and make the payment process simpler. With the new update, the Flutter team has made the in-app purchase eco-system stronger by updating the documentation, building code labs, and re-architectured the plugin. Ads: Monetizing an application is one of the important parts. Google Mobile Ads SDK was first available in the beta version, and developers loved it. In version 2 Flutter team has brought some new changes. Flutter has migrated the GMA SDK and enabled null safety, which helps developers handle exceptions easily and be productive while developing applications. It also supports the latest iOS GMA SDK, which adds App Tracking Transparency in the applications. This makes it easy for developers to develop iOS applications by abiding by all laws of the iOS platform easily. Last and the biggest new feature is Adaptive Banner, which is a new way of responsive ads. This will help developers to maximize their app performance by making it responsive. So, now regardless of the device, you are building your application for, you can use Adaptive Banner using a single-codebase. Flutter Flow: For years now, developers have been requesting a Flutter layout to develop applications fast and easily, directly in the browser. Flutter Flow allows developers to start with Flutter app development and build applications faster, easier, and with less code. This makes development fun for developers, and anyone and everyone can learn it easily. You can easily develop different UIs for your application. Flutter Flow uses Firebase authentication and Firebase database to store your information securely. Now, you can easily develop applications in less time and provide a better user experience. Flutter UWP (Universal Windows Platform): Flutter has now extended its support to Windows UWP, which helps developers easily start with the Windows platform’s Flutter app development. Yes! You read it right. You can now develop applications for multiple Windows platforms like Windows 10, Xbox, and HoloLens. Instead of developing for multiple Windows platforms, using UWP, you need to write code only once. This is still an early Alpha version of Flutter UWP. To use it, set up UWP prerequisites, and go to the dev channel on Github to enable it. Still, the Flutter team has to update and bring many new features in the UWP, making it more stable and interesting to build applications. Let’s wait for future updates on Flutter UWP. Null Safety: Null Safety is an essential part of the development to handle any kind of exceptions. It helps in increasing productivity by helping developers build applications faster and handle exceptions. Dart is a typeface programming language which means depending on the variable declared, it can know which data type it is. But, it could not develop null data variables due to which many exceptions were occurring and reported on the Github repository. Further, to solve these exceptions, there were thousands of commits to fix this issue. As a result, it was hindering developers’ productivity and not helping them have a stronger ecosystem. To avoid these issues and build a stronger ecosystem, Flutter made Null Safety default. This means now developers don’t need to worry about handling exceptions and developing efficiently. Null safety works on three core principles:
Miscellaneous Updates: Apart from the major updates, there are certain minor updates, making the framework fun and easy to learn. Following are some of the miscellaneous updates:
These updates may look pretty small but have a huge impact. Such small updates collectively help in making intuitive and interactive applications and provide a better user experience. Conclusion: With every new release of Flutter, the ecosystem is becoming stronger than before. With Flutter version 2, we can see some major changes coming for the developer circle, which will have a major impact on the future of app development. Moreover, the recent collaboration between Google and Samsung for building smartwatches can also open the gateways for building smartwatch applications using Flutter. This shows that the roadmap of Flutter is stronger, and with time we can expect the framework to mature. During the days when the Flutter is booming, it is a perfect time to invest in Flutter app development. If you want to develop a Flutter application, you can reach out to us. We have a strong team of expert Flutter developers who will help you with application development. CTA: Get in Touch with Us |
Archives
December 2022
Categories
All
|